Quakers get a mental assist

Three to five percent — that’s all Joel Fish is after.

Three to five percent is the free throw, the box-out, the defensive stand you have to have.

Three to five percent won’t make a difference, except in those rare moments when it makes all the difference.

Three to five percent can turn into a life’s work, if you’re at it long enough.

“Three to five percent,” Fish says, nodding softly. “That’s the mental edge.”

Slight yet differential, the three to five percent advantage of the mental edge is what Fish has tried to pass along to the Penn athletic community for some time now, since joining the University as a sports psychologist in 2001. The Philadelphia native — who founded the Center for Sport Psychology in 1987 — counts the Phillies, Flyers and 76ers, as well as the full range of Penn programs, among his regular audiences.

“Sports psychology is about what you feel, what you think and how it relates to performance,” Fish said. “I would never say, ‘Don’t feel pressure. Block that out.’ You’re not a machine. You’re going to feel it.”

The trick, of course, is knowing what to do about it. And in the 30 years since he affixed those hard-won letters to his name — Ph. D., courtesy of the University of Wisconsin — Fish has developed a few theories.

His discussion of the “Big Five” mental skills — confidence, composure, concentration, communication and cohesion — plays well with a local audience, but his relationships with professional teams helped grow his brand in earnest.

After joining the Phillies as a consultant in 1994, he was hired to conduct “personality assessments” of prospective NBA draft picks for the 76ers two years later. His first interview was Allen Iverson.

“It’s a big town, but it’s a small town,” Fish said. “Word started to get around.”

Once it got around to Penn Athletic Director Steve Bilsky 11 years ago, he invited Fish to speak to a group of Penn coaches. The jock doc began the session with a simple question: What percentage of performance is mental?

“From crew to golf to baseball, everyone said at least 50 percent,” Fish recalled. “So I said, ‘Okay, then let’s spend 15 minutes a week talking about the mental part of the game.’”

By the next season, he had a standing gig at 33rd Street — the first of many that found Fish a regular fixture at, among other events, countless men’s basketball practices.

“He really does a good job of tailoring his exercises to our current situation,” senior basketball captain Jack Eggleston said. “I’ve yet to see the winning streak drills.”

A team or athlete encounters any number of mental hurdles in a given season, from slumps to lengthy injuries to playing-time disputes. Fish, players say, seems to have an exercise for each of them.

Junior and basketball captain Zack Rosen described a drill that required the team to tally how many numbers Fish mentioned during a one-minute speech.

“Everyone can basically get it right,” Rosen said. “Then he’ll say, ‘Okay, so we’re capable of concentrating for a minute. We need to break it down into small segments, until you get to 40.’”

Coach Jerome Allen — whose players have also consulted with Wharton management professor Keith Weigelt on mental preparation — is grateful that so much attention is paid to something “so easily said, but so hard to really master.”

For his part, Fish has teamed with Counseling and Psychological Services — which takes the lead on weightier events, like the suicide of football captain Owen Thomas last spring — to promote mental health among the Penn athletic fraternity.

He is sure to preach the importance of evaluating athletic success along multiple dimensions — health and gratification, for instance, as well as more tangible successes.

“It’s dangerous to put all your eggs in the results basket,” he said.

But don’t get the wrong idea. Fish is “not one of those people who believes every game should end in a tie.”

The mental edge remains his domain, and if he can coax it out of a young athlete, the scoreboard reflects as much.

“It’s the difference between going to the foul line with confidence or with your knees shaking,” Fish said.

“It’s the three to five percent.”

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